Fortunately, I remembered at the last moment that the consultant who had set up my system had an existing keyring. I went in and looked prior to running the command. Sure enough - there was authorized_keys2 just setting there, waiting to be overwritten.

But now I'm screwed, because the hack doesn't tell me - a novice - how to append the key onto the existing key. And I'm afaid to just go scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub >> server:.ssh/authorized_keys2 in case it doesn't work right, and I screwup my existing file.

Help!

Plus what's this about authorized_keys2 itself being depreciated? I thought this was a new book?! I would have assumed we'd be getting the very latest in technology.

Can someone (in desending priority order) please:

a: give me the command to safely append to the existing authorized_key2 file,
b: point me to how I can create a key-pair I can split between Linux and Windows, so I can use this trick with PuTTY to connect from Windows to my Linux servers, and
c: if we shouldn't be using authorized_key2 because its depreciated, correct the hack to the proper usage, and tell me how to fix my current authorized_key2 configuration to the proper usage/configuration.